Join Dean and Dan as they talk about procrastination capital.
Links:
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
Transcript: The Joy of Procrastination Ep067
Dean: Mr. Sullivan.
Dan: Mr. Jackson. Here we are. Greetings from Ilko. I had lunch with Ilko last Monday, had lunch at the Soho Hotel in Soho in the middle of London and he sent you his best and he's looking forward to July, he's looking forward to your July trip. Kim White joined us and Kim is going to be a participant in the Profit Activators workshop that you're doing in Amsterdam.
Dean: In Amsterdam yes.
Dan: I just wanted to let you know that cosmic connections are being made all around the world by people.
Dean: I love it. That's so great.
Dan: That's in part, you know the only world that any of us actually needs is a constantly expanding network of like-minded people.
Dean: I think you're absolutely right. This is the fourth year that I'll be going to Amsterdam and yeah Kim White has been trying to make it to Breakthrough Blueprint since I started doing them. So this next month Dan, next month will be seven years since you and I had the conversation that started it off.
Dan: I remember the conversation.
Dean: I do too.
Dan: I remember the conversation. Fascinating and motivating. Dean, let me ask you the question, if the rest of your life could be fascinating and motivating, what would qualify as the number one activity and you told me, and then here we are seven years later.
Dean: Isn't that amazing?
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: I love it. Cheers to seven more.
Dan: Seven more.
Dean: On the path to 25 more. We have a couple of weeks where we didn't speak here. So I'm interested to hear all about your London adventure that's here you were. You'd been to Phoenix before that too.
Dan: Yeah we were at Genius at the 100K level and yeah a lot of really great things. They actually did something very interesting for two days and that is, basically they did the hot seats for two days. So everybody in the group for two days, we did hot seats. It was interesting because I and Babz and Paul Hamilton we were up there as a threesome.
We talked about the new use of podcast to generate funnel leads. In other words that if you can take all your podcast and funnel them through a webinar that vastly expands your marketing. We are doing the same thing with my quarterly books which are now on Kindle, going up on Kindle. So for 99 cents you can download an eBook, the 17 that we have so far. 17 comes out in about 10 days and then you can pull down the audio, you can pull down the video, you can do a mindset score card. But another click it takes you to a webinar and that webinar is a funnel webinar.
All this I've learned since I joined Genius Network so it felt so good. We were good sales people, I have to say right from the beginning. I think any entrepreneur who's successful in the market place it's because they're a good sales person. But that doesn't mean they're good marketers, so there's a good distinction which I've taken from Joe Polish that being a good sales person is when you actually get a chance to interact with someone.
But what allows you to be in a position to interact with someone is actually a function of marketing. I've noticed that Dean and you probably have too, in my own client base, Strategic Coach, that there's a lot of really great sales people but the change in technology in the world has made it more and more difficult for them to actually be in front of people, to actually make their sales.
So a new scale is required they have to master using, I think cloud landia, to actually put themselves in a position where they can get their message out to more people, so that's what I noticed. We got pretty good marks for what we're doing, at this stage of Strategic Coach where we are right now.
Dean: That's absolutely true. I do find it easier, like if I have somebody come in to the Breakthrough Blueprint and they've already got a great sales process that's like a home run. It's a home run because the marketing then can amplify that.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Often I find people who have a really great delivery process meaning they've really got a unit that can deliver the result and get the outcomes for people but they don't have sales or marketing. That's more of a pill thing they have to learn both of those.
Dan: Yeah, it's very interesting because most training in the world you think about all the different activities that make up the world. Most of the educational and training process is the delivery of some sort of product or some sort of service, it's about delivering it and actually having someone actually purchase what it is that you've trained yourself for.
But that's like step number three and when I came into the entrepreneurial world step number one at that point was to actually get a customer to actually get yourself in front of the customer. If you could do that then you could deliver your product or service if you were persuasive.
But now I would say in the last 20 years, 25 years there's another step that comes before getting yourself in front of them and that's marketing. You have to differentiate yourself in such a way from increase cooperation to actually get yourself that someone would say hey, you seem to be doing something interesting and I'm willing to give you some of my time for you to tell me. That's marketing, that's not sales, that's marketing.
Dean: Exactly right. Very interesting.
Dan: Yeah and when I think about credential I usually think of either professional training, people go through a long period, let's take doctors, let's take lawyers, accountants, engineers, architects.
They have a long training process and they become a thing, they become a professional. But that credential as a thing doesn't market you and that thing that credential you have, doesn't sell anybody. It's like you've gone and you've bought yourself a really nice suit but that kind of is important that you have a good suit. In other words you don't want to look out of place but all it does is give you a place to actually begin your marketing and begin your selling it.
It doesn't really get you anywhere anymore.
Dean: Right, you're absolutely right. Yeah I think our access to credentialed people I mean is just so much more so effortless. That's really the thing is that our almost infinite choices that we have available. Now our access to not only specific profession but just the volume of them and the ability to kind of evaluate them or hear when other people evaluate them.
All that's really happened in the last 12 years or so. The onset of the everybody speaking back kind of internet.
Dan: Yeah it's really interesting because I think that there's a sense of general confusion in the world. I mean almost every narrative in the world is how uncertain and how unpredictable and how complicated things have become in the world. This relates to the economic news, the political news, the social news, the cultural news, everything has become very unpredictable. I said well you must be comparing that against sometime before that when things on those levels actually were predictable. When was that? When were things predictable? Do you remember when things were predictable?
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: I mean we've been out in the market place on our own for many decades and I can't remember anything staying predictable for much more than a quarter, you know 90 days and then all of a sudden you got to be on your toes again because oh oh something I thought was predictable isn't predictable anymore.
Dean: I mean one thing I've definitely noticed though is the frequency or the velocity of that unpredictability. That's one of the big thing I was thinking back to 25 years ago, the velocity of access to information or the frequency to access it.
Because essentially you had your whole routine of six newspapers a day that was cutting edge. That was as fast as up to date as you could be in the market place. You took that time and the newspaper arrived one time a day and that's what you had access to. You could watch the news at 6:00 o'clock and 11:00 o'clock or whatever to get a sense of what's going on there.
Dan: Maybe 8:00 o'clock in the morning because of early morning news.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: As a matter of fact I don't know if you remember this but when I moved to Toronto in 1974 we're just coming up on my 45th year in the first week in June. So June 5th 1971, I moved to Toronto from Maryland. I graduated from college in Maryland. On a Sunday got on a plane on Monday, reported to my advertising agency on a Tuesday and on a Wednesday I wrote my first ad.
Dean: I love it.
Dan: That was a great transition. Because I had gone to a college where you studied great quotes of the western world going back 2,500 years where how in touch with the past were you? You know you had to really have a good grasp. Then within a four day period I switched worlds where in the advertising world, what you did yesterday really didn't matter, what are you going to do for us today.
So it was a nice get used to a new world transition for me. I loved it, but I've been in that world pretty much ever since for 45 years, it's always been about okay well what you did yesterday, get some value out of it, but nobody is interested. Nobody is really interested.
Just to stay in touch of what's the new game, what's the new game. Might be a small thing, sometimes it was a big thing but you're always having to pay attention to what's the new world.
Dean: Yes. Do you recall what the first ad that you wrote was? What it was for?
Dan: Yeah it was for consumer's gas actually. This was the main supplier of natural gas in Toronto. It was more or less a Toronto based gas company, consumer's gas, maybe Ontario, I think maybe it was Ontario. I had to write an ad and I got feedback on how I could improve my ad and how to go deeper and understanding what the ad should say, what was meaningful to someone reading it.
Virtually everything I did for the first two years in advertising was print, it wasn't radio, it wasn't TV. People got paid more to write got to do the radio and the TV. I was at the bottom.
Dean: Copy cub.
Dan: Yeah. I was a grinder, I was print grinder.
Dean: Okay.
Dan: You had to prove yourself as a print grinder. But print is, as you've proven with your nine word emails, print can be much more powerful and differentiating than the cloud landia messages. Well it is cloud landia message in the sense you're sending it on email.
Dean: It's from the spirit of print because all these things that I do with the postcards. You should imagine them as hand written notes.
Dan: Yeah, so print was a different kind of delivery system.
Dean: That's right.
Dan: But knowing the language and knowing how to attract attention with the fewest number of words still rules the communication world.
Dean: I agree. Now you know I have read a couple of interesting things since we were together last. One of those just a couple of days I saw an article that proposed that Da Vinci may have like us suffered from, not suffered from, was ADHD as well. That was an interesting thing.
There was an article that was speculated of the masters or whatever he had a lot of unfinished projects. Have you heard this or know anything about this?
Dan: No I haven't, I remember a phrase because Michelangelo and Da Vinci were alive at the same time and Michelangelo was the person who could stay with things and Da Vinci was the person who couldn't stay with things. Michelangelo had a dismissive attitude towards Leonardo. He says, you got a lot of talent but why don't you stick with something?
Dean: Is that true, that's what he said, that's funny.
Dan: I mean like the Sistine Chapel I mean takes a lot of follow through finish a project like that. There's isn't much evidence of Michelangelo's unfinished projects. But with Leonardo they're almost all unfinished.
Dean: Right.
Dan: Or the different things that he tried they're almost all unfinished you know.
Dean: Yes. There was an interesting statement that they made which was a way of being able to, it wasn't the right word, but it was a to maximizing or something. ADHD it's incredible that Leonardo can-
Dan: Hello?
Dean: Hello?
Dan: Yeah so you were just talking about ADHD and then you were gone.
Dean: Squirrel, that's so funny.
Dan: I mean we couldn't have planned that one better actually.
Dean: That is so funny.
Dan: Let's give them a real world experience of what ADHD is actually like.
Dean: Yeah exactly. Did you hear the quote that I was reading about him?
Dan: Yeah you were just starting the quote and then you thought of something else in the course. Talking to me was irrelevant.
Dean: The words that were really interesting about it was the idea that ADHD is not an indication of low IQ or low ability but the thing that earmarked it was a failure to capitalize on natural talents. That's other words for imagine if he applied himself, that's what his art teacher probably said to him. I think you got some good ideas here Leonardo and you're able to get excellent results with what seems like little effort, imagine if you applied yourself.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: That's probably what Michelangelo said to Da Vinci.
Dan: Yeah I mean it was just interesting because I was reminded of Leonardo because there was a drawing of his that was discovered about 10 days ago and it was went and published widely throughout the internet of him at 12 years old and what kind of drawing ability he had.
He was really good at 12 years old. He had quite a bit of mastery. I think part of the problem was that for him he didn't have a lot of financial backing at any really given time in his life where Michelangelo got some big patrons like the pope, the pope was always good.
Also he kind of kept his opinions, Michelangelo kept his opinions to himself regrading politics and I think Leonardo got into trouble with some of his thoughts. You got to watch out there is one force in the world that you got to be very careful about if you're kind of a creative person and you're introducing new things, and that force is politics.
Because politics can put you in a bad light and keep you in a bad light if you don't watch your step. You really notice it in the social media world that someone can say something and bam they just get clobbered and they have a hard time. You can be talented as you want in today's world but you got to watch your step.
Dean: That's absolutely true. You don't even have to watch your step because other people are watching your steps for you. Any one misstep all the way back to trace all of your steps, that's really what's happening.
Dan: Wow it is. Because now there's a record. I was listening to this Scott Adams who's commentaries I enjoy pretty well on a daily basis, I watch his podcasts. He said in the social media world we've got to establish some rules. One of the rules is what somebody said so 20 years, you got to give him a reprieve on that.
Like if you go back 20 years and you made a mistake, we should give 20 year forgiveness to people if they said something 20 years ago.
Dean: Right.
Dan: The other thing he said that if somebody says something stupid right now they should be given a three day grace period to correct themselves.
Dean: Yes he's such a rational thinker.
Dan: Yeah well I think first of all would you want that applied to yourself? I think what he's simply saying like grant to others what you would like to be given yourself.
Dean: That's true, 20 years is a long time.
Dan: I mean who were you 20 years ago? What was I saying 20 years ago was simply an indication of ignorance or just on the wrong track. I said no I really corrected my thinking on that front from 20 years ago. I wouldn't say that today so give me a break.
Dean: In the words of Oprah Winfrey quoting Maya Angelo she said, "When you knew what you knew, you did what you did, and when you know better, you do better."
Dan: Yeah and yeah since it's all safe now, and anybody can be caught up on something they were actually were thinking and saying and doing at a previous stage of development. First of all ask them the question do you still think that way and are you still talking that way and are you still saying? If so okay well then that's you've stuck with it. But if you've changed your mind, give us the up to date version of what you're thinking about that.
Dean: Yeah that's true.
Dan: There's a thing called presentism, I don't know if you have come across this term, it's called presentism.
Dean: No.
Dan: That is where people are now going back in history and judging people who lived hundreds of years ago by present day standards. It's really not fair.
Dean: That's interesting. Like saying well that conveys him because look what he was doing then.
Dan: Yeah in other words, you're treating someone like they're a modern day person but they don't have the advantage of being in the present day, they were 200 years ago. You're judging them on how they performed then based on what the present standards are. It just destroys history it destroys philosophy, it destroys all sorts of things.
Plus the person who's being judged was a tremendous achiever back then in a way that the critic is not today.
Dean: Mm-hmm.
Dan: It's easy to be a critic of other people's behavior and other people's words but if you had to compare the quality of their actions and the quality of their thinking in relationship to their time maybe what they achieved back then is a lot more than you're achieving right now by being the critic.
Dean: I think that's almost always true of any sort of critique.
Dan: Yeah. I mean criticism is really easy. Creativity takes a quite a bit more talent to be a creator than a critic.
Dean: Risk, is the risk, criticism.
Dan: Yeah. Criticism is where you hide so you don't have to take any risks.
Dean: Yes, that's interesting. You see that in movies all the time. Have you noticed that the role of the movie critic has really gone down?
Dan: Yes.
Dean: Remember how important Siskel and Ebert were to the movie world?
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: You get a thumbs up from Siskel and Ebert and now that has really shifted a self regulating system now with rotten tomatoes really being the public perception of that.
Dan: Well you're one of the ones who's contributed to that with your Friday first movie on Friday of a new movie.
Dean: That's right.
Dan: Oh guys, this is not worth your time, do not go to the movie this weekend to see this movie.
Dean: Right, don't see this one.
Dan: This is a dog. Who are you?
Dean: Yes.
Dan: Well you're somebody who has thousands of people who wait for your Friday afternoon.
Dean: That's exactly right. Investing our Friday afternoon so you don't have to ruin your Friday night. That's been our tagline.
Dan: Now I remember Pauline Kael, I don't know if you remember the name Pauline Kale. I think she was either New York Times or New Yorker.
Dean: Okay.
Dan: Hollywood just sat on the edge of their seats on the weekends to see what Pauline Kael would say about the latest movie. Yeah in today's world it's dead by midnight on Friday.
Dean: You know there was the director Kevin Smith, who did Clerks and Chasing Amy and Dogma all these, an independent film maker. He was really on the forefront of being vocal against the whole critic world. What makes these people's opinions any more valuable or worthy than the public. How the movie industry kind of kowtows, trying to placate the critics, showing special screenings for them and all these things.
He actually did a TV show with AMC it was called Spoilers. They would take 50 people, they filmed at Universal Studios in LA like the amusement park area. There's a movie theater there, so they would take 50 people and he would pay for 50 people to go see a movie and then they would come back to the studio across the parking lot and they would discuss the movie. That was a real like honest view of the movie as opposed to a critic who's got any kind of a special thing.
He was one of the first to kind of do something like that, that's an interesting perspective.
Dan: Well here's the thing we all live. Do you know Howard Jetson?
Dean: I do, yes.
Dan: Well Howard I've known for the last 15 years and Howard his passion in life is to use artificial intelligence to take advantage of very short windows of pricing in the market place. In other words, he's at a stage now where's he's got an artificial intelligence program that can literally take advantage of thousands of pricing estimations in the market place.
The money is made on micro seconds of time and anything. So I was talking to him at Genius Network the big conference that Joe has in the fall. We were just chatting, and I said you know everybody is talking about artificial intelligence, but actually all humans live inside a system of super intelligence and that's what I call the pricing mechanism of the market place.
In other words what is a product or service worth right now in the market place? What you'll notice the price of that service or product could change 20 times in the awaking day. In other words you get up in the morning, and it's worth this at noon it's worth something else and before you go to bed it's worth something else.
That price is a collective determination. In other words everybody who's involved in buying and selling that product is shifting throughout the day what anyone's going to have to pay for it. I think it relates to your example of letting 50 people see it and then go back and talk about it. They'll put a price on it, they'll actually put a price on it and it doesn't come from any one of the people who saw it, it's a general collective statement, I think it's going to worth this, I think it's going to worth that, and they influence each other, the 50 people, they influence each other.
But what comes out is more accurate than some individual isolated going and watching it and coming back and writing their opinion of it.
Dean: Yes. You mentioned something about super intelligence there. I was just having a conversation with Perry Massie this morning about this word artificial intelligence. We're kind of lobbying to have the A in AI changed to advantaged intelligence, as opposed to artificial intelligence because that's really what it is.
Dan: Well first of all it's really fast. We have a client that I do quarterly we have a book discussion. Every time the word artificial intelligence is used he said, I'd like to substitute for really fast computing.
Dean: Really fast computing that's great, that's really what it is. Which is an advantage.
Dan: Yeah it's an advantage and the advantage comes that it can crunch all the data from a particular experience faster than any human can do.
Dean: You look at the speed of it, and I had a conversation with Howard about that very thing. That when you look at the how many computations per second it's doing. It's like if you had the advantage of pushing the pause button before every second and having, I don't know how many but let's say 1,000 but it's way more than that. But anyways if you're able to do that almost like take that much time to research and evaluate all of the data like to know. You know those numbers are knowable to be able to then predict what's going to happen in the next 10 seconds of this is a big advantage because you can make your prediction. Then watch, move it advance it ever so slightly one more millisecond and see if it's heading in the right direction. It's a pretty interesting thing.
Dan: I've got a new thought for you.
Dean: Okay.
Dan: I think I've brought this thought up before but it's a thought that stayed with me and I find that thoughts that stay with me over a long period of time, and it's one of my tests if it's worth going more deeply about it.
Dean: You're persistent right.
Dan: Yes it's kind of like you should be finding joy in your procrastination. That's often stayed with me and I had to tell someone about it and you're an ideal person to tell something like that, because you immediately said oh that's an interesting thought.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: Here's the thought that the disruptive force in the world is actually unpredictable consumers with a new capability. What I mean, so what I'm looking at because I've been head on in this venture with Peter Diamandis with the Abundance A360. We have the conference the yearly conference and I'm going to these constant webinars and reports throughout the year.
If anybody is interested in the Abundance A360 it's really great to be in touch with someone who is kind of like a scout out there introducing and interviewing really interesting people or doing new things technology.
But what's happened and this started about 40 years ago, 45 years ago, I notice is that technology was being positioned as a force that was now in charge of us. It was now determining what our future was going to be. It's almost like we now have a four spaced on Moore's Law, Morse law being the speed up of technology every couple of years based on the microchip.
Therefore, this force is now in control of our future and I said, hmm, the more and more I think about it is that it's technology that's trying to catch up with us. What in fact is happening is that human beings are feeling more and more confidence in aspiring to wants that don't quite exist yet, I want this, I want this.
It's totally unpredictable from second to second, what kind of new aspirations human beings, and there's a billion of them or so on the planet. Anytime you give them a new capability take social media for example or the internet, just the internet, all of a sudden humans start having aspirations for things that are completely and totally unpredictable.
Talk about exponential if you take a billion kind of new aspirations that were taught before, it's technology that's trying to stay up with the humans, it's not the human that are trying to stay up with the technology.
Dean: Yes. That is true. It's funny how, because who would have known, I think about that in our own world, right? Like who would have thought that we would want an entire fleet of vehicles at our beck and call anywhere we go in the world instantly on our phone, you know? It's kind of a, we didn't know we needed that until now.
Dan: Well we've all waited. I can't remember the last time I rented a car. Or the last time you had to wait a half hour in the hopes that a cab a taxi cab would show up.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: I said that's not what they want. I don't want to spend a half hour waiting for a taxi cab. I have a thought I want to go somewhere, I want to communicate that thought to someone and I've got the best possible chance that someone in a very short period of time is going to take note of what I want and is going to come and say hey I can provide that to you.
Dean: Yes I love that kind of thing, the closest thing I've seen about the keeping up with technology is you know Jeff Bezos his whole thing about the one thing he's building the company on is that he knows that 10 years from now people are going to want as wide a selection of products as they can get. They're going to want them as fast as they can and they're going to want them as cheaply as they can get them.
That's what is adopting the technology to drive those three things as opposed to trying to adopt the technology. I think that New York Times article that we've talked about, about the tyranny of convenience that you're not going to go wrong with the base desires that we have of getting all these basic things as fast as we can. We have that nature.
I think that's where the real thing comes is to tap into what is it that you're really kind of tapping the technology into, to aid. Because I look at those base desires that we have as that's the jet stream. That if you can get up in the jet stream that's what really gives it momentum. This is why it feels like virtual reality is really coming up against us slowing because it doesn't easily attach to making anything easier so much. It's so out of our normal realm.
Dan: Not only that, the other thing is as it exists now it's not really social, in other words it's kind of isolating.
Dean: That's what I mean it seems isolating right yeah.
Dan: Yeah it's kind of isolating and it seems to appeal to people who are already isolated and they're just trying to make their isolation a little bit more interesting.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: Yeah I mean I guess drugs do that too, I mean I guess, I'm not giving away anything here that I can be held accountable for 20 years from now. But the whole point is that there's the trivial and then there's the meaningful. I think we want to pay as little as possible and take as little time to get trivial requirements handled so that we've got more time and we've got more head space for things that are really meaningful. The Jeff Bezos' of world are becoming masters of the trivial but there's a whole other world that's developing and expanding which is the world of the meaningful and that is absolutely unpredictable.
Dean: Yes. You know I don't know how this fits in that world, but I wanted to tell you about A, I'm observing the collaboration world to see all this evidence of things that are pointing in that direction, in the game changer direction. There's a really fascinating story that's just sort of rounding completion here.
There's a song that was the number one song on all of Billboard called Old Town Road, I don't know if you are in touch with what's going on in the music scene. But it's a big deal to be the number one song in the world on Billboard and even more when you listen to what happened to make that so.
So there's this young kid, Lil Nas X that's the kid's name, he's a young rapper here in the States. There's another young guy named Kia in a small town outside of Amsterdam who was making beats in his bedroom on his computer making beats for rap songs or like the music that goes underneath what they rap on.
The whole thing is that people will write beats, these rappers will find the beat and they will make a song over top of this beat. So this kid in Amsterdam is making beats in his bedroom and posting them up on Sound Cloud and YouTube so that they're up into cloud landia now. That one to one connection it goes straight from his bedroom, straight into the mainstream in cloud landia.
Now Lil Nas X was living at his grandmother’s house and he finds beats online, on YouTube free beats that are posted up there, people post up there beat so you can sample it and play around with it. Then if you're going to commercial it, then you enter into an agreement with them.
Dan: An agreement yeah.
Dean: To license it, yes okay. So he takes that beat, he made this makeshift recording studio or booth in his grandmother's closet, he's converted that into a vocal booth.
Dan: Where's the rapper, where is he?
Dean: He's in the United States. I don't know where he's in Atlanta or New Orleans or somewhere. He's somewhere in the United States in his grandmother's closet.
Dan: He's young too, they're both young right?
Dean: They're both young yes. So this song that he makes is a country rap.
Dan: A rap?
Dean: Yes okay so he's a young African-American kid who makes a country rap and this song now starts making it's way around the internet and starting to gain in popularity, they release the song and it goes onto the Billboard country charts. Then it starts rising up the charts and Billboard removes it from the country charts and says, this is not quite country, right?
So there's a lot of controversy about that because they feared that they would be kind of opening up the flood gates to stuff that wasn't quite country music to get on the country charts. Then Billy Ray Cyrus who is like country star from ages ago, Miley Cyrus' father but well one of the biggest known country stars.
He gets involved and he does a verse on the song with them and the song goes to number one on the normal Billboard charts, on the hot 100, the open category of Billboards right. You realize just the power of this collaboration of what's happened here.
The two kids in their bedrooms basically are tapping in Cloud landia and this collaboration and taking something out into the world. It becomes the number one song in the world.
Dan: It's great. Well the other thing is that Billboard actually created controversy. It was probably the controversy which gave it an extra boost it was like booster.
Dean: Well I'm sure that did give it an extra boost. But it was definitely on its way to number one, that's why.
Dan: Then someone who has real credentials in the country world decided to assist Billy Ray Cyrus.
Dean: Yeah,
Dan: Would you mind kind of packaging this for our next game changer?
Dean: Packaging the thought of this or the breakdown of what happened?
Dan: Yeah, well I mean you could verbally but then if we could see something up on the screen that would be really interesting. Because I think it's a very pure example of exactly what we do mean by collaboration.
Dean: That's exactly it.
Dan: Because obviously the beat had creative value to the words, or the rap lyrics that were put to it has a value. Then there was a platform that they could put it on. Then someone who has what I would say reputation and credibility says hey this is a good thing, let's go with it, let's take this thing. So it seems to me that it's a perfect version of collaboration.
Dean: It just shows that basically the market place this is how it ties into what you were saying earlier that the market place is the ultimate meritocracy. I mean it really is.
Dan: Yeah it puts a value on it, and puts a price on it.
Dean: That's exactly it.
Dan: Not a single critic in the world has any power against the growth of this particular creation. This particular creation is going to go where the market place says that it's going to go.
Dean: That's exactly right.
Dan: It's a perfect example.
Dean: How that's changed over the last 50 years. Back then there were six guys who owned the record label that determined everything that we got to hear. Some of like the guys didn't like it then you're in trouble.
Dan: Well it's like the National Film Board of Canada determining who gets funding for a film.
Dean: Right.
Dan: There's like six of them and they all have exactly the same political views, the same cultural views and they have access to the money and I knew somebody who was involved with that and they said well here's the criteria, it has to be slightly anti American, it has to be even though it's in color it feels like it's in black and white. It has to happen in winter and it's about people who really don't have their act together and they're basically talking about how things aren't really good and the world doesn't care about them, they don't count. That would qualify you for a grant in the national film book.
Dean: Amazing. Very formulaic that's funny.
Dan: It should not be inspirations at all. It shouldn't given you a better feeling at the end of the movie than you had at the beginning of the movie and that would qualify for a National Film Board grant. On the other hand every great Canadian movie produced in Canada that I've ever seen comes from Montreal or Quebec city.
Where they give much greater leeway for someone, hey write a great script, product a good movie and we're off to the races. If I go back 48 years, I can count the number of really interesting, amusing, entertaining Canadian movies, I'm reading English, sub heads, because it's in French.
Dean: Amazing.
Dan: I haven't seen an English speaking, great English speaking movie in 48 years because there are six people who control what I can see.
Dean: Isn't that something?
Dan: Yeah this is a fabulous game changer collaboration, exactly it's a good one.
Dean: That fits in the same family as the Kylie Jenner collaboration. This is a kid that didn't have 110 million Instagram followers. The story of what he did to actually get out and push the phone into the world.
Dan: Oh yeah the other thing, is that probably both of them were just playing around and then it became substantial.
Dean: In their bliss that's exactly right.
Dan: They were just having a good time and they said hey, maybe somebody will be interested in this.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: Yeah I love it.
Dean: Amazing.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Well that's good, I'll put together a couple of, there's some good little short video clips that talk about the collaboration. There's this one in particular.
Dan: Yeah and the thing is I was just going up our eight Cs and the first thing is that there's capabilities on two sides and then there's collaboration and then what happens next is content gets created your stuff has got to have content. Then there's credibility because first of all it ended up on Billboard.
Then because of the credibility that it was going up the charts on the country side and then the controversy was created. Then there were connections and the connection, Billy Ray Cyrus, all of a sudden there's a connection that comes in. There's a community that forms around this and then there's lots of confidence and ultimately there's going to be cash in this. You get to the top billboard there's going to be some cash somewhere along the way.
Dean: Yes that's so great, that's amazing, I love that. What an elegant example.
Dan: Yeah it's first class and neither could have created the collaboration without the other, they both needed it.
Dean: That's exactly right.
Dan: They needed the other capability to do something. It's a prefect game changer collaboration. Now watch the copy cats.
Dean: I'm the observer of it all, definitely on the look out for them now that we've got a lens to kind of identify them through, I'm beyond my radar now.
Dan: It's really interesting. Yeah, it's really interesting. You know I just turned 75, last Sunday I was 75, I'm into the fourth quarter now this is the real quarter. I'm talking about quarter of a century here. I'm looking at the next 25 years and one of the things that really struck me and it's been going on for about two years now, but I've just fallen in love with Roy Orbison 1960s, late 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s.
I've been reading all about him and his music is absolutely up to date like things that he created 30, 40 years ago, I'm noticing how fresh it is. I was reading what other artists like Bob Dylan and a whole bunch people said they said you know he's in another world when we listen to Roy Orbison, we don't know it comes from, we don't know where it's going.
They were going through all of his songs and he doesn't have the same structure to any two songs. Every song has its own structure. They asked him why that was and he said, "Well I never learned proper structure." He says, "You know I didn't go to a class that if you're going to have a good structure for a song." he said, "I kind of missed that, I was missing that day."
Dean: I love it.
Dan: He didn't apply himself to proper structure. He said, "I don't know what it is, I get a tune, I get a feeling and I say, oh this is really good, but you got to have a change here to make it interesting." He's the song writer, he's the lyricist and he's the singer. I was thinking why he's my favorite all time pop singer and the reason is I think that his voice was such and his musicality was such that anybody else's song he could sing it as well if not better than they could, but not one of them could sing one of his songs. He's the least repeated of any major singer.
Dean: Yes, I got you.
Dan: He's just got this voice. Four octaves without moving.
Dean: Right.
Dan: Anyway but it's really interesting to see that, he wasn't planning, he was planning on being I think an oil field engineer or something like that, and he had to make a living, and he went on and just started doing this, it took him a while. But I love this type of story just to find this type of story. The thing is I go back to my central thesis here the most disruptive thing in the world is an unpredictable consumer with a new capability.
Dean: Yes. I think this is going to be an interesting quarter for you.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah well I want to tell people I've got a little exercise and the thing is that is to take a look at your biggest breakthroughs in relationship to someone who is a consumer of what you create for them. What was it that was unpredictable about them that you gave them a new capability and a result of that they took off like a racket. It's so interesting.
So it's actually to do a little bit of checking out where you've had the great breakthroughs as an entrepreneur is where you were paying attention to the consumer. The consumer was aspiring in an unpredictable way and you happen to come along and gave them a new capability. So they were able to achieve and that couldn't have been predicted by anyone else what you did.
Dean: Right. I'm going to think about that.
Dan: Yeah. Well I'll put it together in a little thinking exercise so everybody will actually identify two or three, usually three if you can get three where you've done this, you kind of get the pattern of what it looks like.
Dean: I love it.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Well Dan I always love our conversations.
Dan: Yeah I love, I mean I'll be intrigued of just taking what you told me about those collaboration, Billboard collaboration. I think everybody will be fascinated because it will be a real shift but it's so pure collaboration that I think everybody will get it.
Dean: Pure like one degree of separation. I mean like one, somebody at the very grass roots going straight from there to Billboard.
Dan: Cloud landia.
Dean: Without seemingly paying their dues or whatever. It's like the fast track if you tap into it. So Dan I arrive in Canada on June 7th and I'm hoping we'll be back on track for our lunch on June 8th if you're in town.
Dan: Yeah, flight on my Chicago that day.
Dean: Okay. Well then we'll have to do the next Saturday when you're back. I'm there till the 21st.
Dan: I'll be back. Yes.
Dean: Perfect, I love it.
Dan: All right.
Dean: I'll talk to you soon.
Dan: Okay, thanks bye.
Dean: Thanks Dan.